Hesperus or Forty-Five Dog-Post-Days Volume II Part 22

Victor, who never made the anxiety of a man still greater, gave us some satisfaction about his Lordship. He went to the convent to Clotilda, to announce our visit to her and the Abbess,--the lateness of the visit he excuses by the necessity of a nightly return. Till he comes back, I suspend my story. My eyes followed him on his way to the betrothed; and his hand, his eye, and his mouth were full of greetings for every one, especially for despised people, for old men, for old widows. The joy of my hero becomes mine. Time is working at the beautiful day, when his heart shall forever melt into one with the betrothed, when, without a remaining link of the sundered flea- and ape-chain of the court, he shall walk freely through nature, be nothing but a man, make nothing but curves, instead of _cour_, love nothing but the whole world, and be too happy to be envied. Then will I, for once, my Bastian, eat with thee at evening in the moonlight, under the steam and the hum of the linden, and seat myself on the bales of freshly unpacked and printed Dog-Post-Days. For the rest,--although I did let my own inner man sit to paint his by,--I am but a wretched, dissolved, wiped-out slate-copy of him, only a very freely paraphrased interpretation of this soul; and I find that a cultivated parson's son is, at bottom, better than an uncultivated prince, and that princes are not, like poets, born, but made.

I hope I have material enough to keep me writing till he comes back. I have, in fact, in this biography, as supernumerary copyist of Nature, all along borrowed from reality,--e. g. for Flamin's character I had in my head a captain of dragoons,--in the case of Emanuel, I thought of a great man dead, a celebrated writer, who, the very day when I with sweet, shuddering entrancement wrote Emanuel's dream of annihilation, went from the earth and half under it,--the G.o.ddess Clotilda I compounded of two female angels, and I shall see for myself, in a few minutes, whether I hit them. It is provoking, that in conversations, from the force of habit, I give to the people of this book the names they bear in the Dog-Post-Days; whereas Flamin is properly called * *, and Victor * *, and Clotilda actually * *. It were to be wished--I have not sworn not to do it--that I could, after the death of some moral _blases_ and plague-infected personages of these volumes, or after my own, make known to the world the true names. If I do it, then will learned Europe be initiated into all the reasons, which the political world already knows, that have kept the Mining-Superintendent from letting fall upon some parts of his history (especially upon the court) so much light as he might actually have given; and I am curious to see whether, after the _expose_ of these reasons, the newspaper correspondent A. and the secretary of legation Z.--the two greatest enemies of the Flachlsenfingen court, and of me personally--will still a.s.sert that I am stupid. Nay, I am bold enough to appeal publicly here to the * * agent in * * to say whether I have not wholly left out many persons in the history, who had acted a part in it, and who had entered into the actual machinery of my biographical sugar-mill as undershot wheels; nay, more, I even give my pair of adversaries permission to name to the world the personages I have left out,--who have some power to do injury,--if this two-head vulture has the heart to do it....

The good Spitzius Hofmann is now wagging his tail, and leaping up before me. Good, industrious Post-Dog! Jean Paul's biographical Egeria!

I will, as an encouraging example, so soon as I have time, flay thee and stuff thee neatly, and fill thee as with a sausage-filling of hay, in order to set thee up in a public library as thine own bust beside other distinguished scholars!--Meusel is a reasonable man, to whom I will apply, in a private and autographic communication, for a seat in his Learned Germany for Spitz. This scholar will not be able, any better than I, to see why such a diligent hod-carrier and compiler and forwarder of learning as my dog is should suffer a more pitiful and colder fate than other learned hod-carriers, merely because he bears a tail, which represents his posterior-toupee. That is all which gives the poor beast an inferior place in the scale of literati.

--I now see Victor escorted with lights through the bowers of the garden. I will only throw out, as hastily as possible, the further statement, that I am sitting in the sacristy of Emanuel, which is latticed with leafless shrubbery. Hurry not so, Sebastian, thou that, in respect to thy previous transformations, resemblest the three or four pseudo-Sebastians in Portugal; hurry not, that I may still simply say to my sister, "Thou beloved ex-sister, thy crazy brother writes himself _von_, but thou hast lost only his breast, not his heart. When I come to Scheerau, I will care for nothing, but weep on thee during the embrace, and finally say, It is no matter. My spirit is thy brother, thy soul is my sister; and so, change not, sisterly heart."

--The good Victor walks hastily, Ah, men whom sorrow has often chilled have neither in their bodily nor moral motions the slow symmetry of prosperous fortune, just as people who wade in the water take great broad strides.--Poor Victor! why dost thou now weep so, that thou absolutely canst not dry thy tears?...

FOUR O'CLOCK IN THE MORNING, IN THE ISLAND OF REUNION.

Ah, it is long ago that I asked, "Will this book close with a tear?"--Victor came back at eight o'clock last night with two great immovable tears on the brink of his eyelid, and said: "We will just hasten back somewhat rapidly to the island. Clotilda herself begs us to do so, and to take another time for seeing her."--"A misfortune," I have dreamed, "is just now rearing itself large and high like a sea-serpent, and flinging itself upon human hearts, as that does upon ships, and crushing them under." She had grown every minute more anxious and oppressed, as one becomes in a damp spot over which the lightning darts and hisses. What else did this imply, than that his Lordship had disclosed to his faithful friend things which we feared this night to experience? And we could none of us any longer conceal from ourselves the fear that his weary spirit meant perhaps, like Lycurgus, to stamp the seal of his corpse upon his a.s.surance that we were January's sons, and, moreover, on our oath to be good, and on that of the Prince to obey my brothers, till he should return.

"Weep not so sorely, Victor," said I; "it is not, after all, yet certain." He quietly dried his eyes, and merely said: "We will, then, now go to the island,--it is already nine o'clock."

We went along, far, far aside from the spotted weeping-birch, which threw its torn-off leaves toward the wasted remains of the great man.

Victor could not look that way for sorrow; but I looked with a chill trembling where it swayed in the serene night-heavens. Not until after some days, when Victor had become happier; had the dust of Emanuel contracted itself again, as it were, into a pale form, and erected itself out on the burial-green, and opened wide its arms for its old darling,--and Victor moaned and pined, and sought vainly to press the white shadow to his dying breast.

He smiled sadly, as he sought to divert us and himself by the words, "Foolish man ducks like a bird, if calamity only approaches him from afar off." His tears made him a blind man, and Flamin and I were his guides; nevertheless he greeted in his pain a night-express.

I have said nothing (for I cannot) of the _garden of termination_, of the withered scene of faded, leafless days of joy.

Over the stubble and over the chrysalides of night-b.u.t.terflies (the jugglers of future spring-nights), and over the steadfast, subterranean winter sleep, swept the solitary night-winds.--Ah, man might well think, "Breezes, come ye not hither over graves, over precious, precious graves?--"

I said, "How slender is the pale-green interval of earth between human bodies and human skeletons!"--Victor said, "Ah, Nature has so much repose, and why has our heart so little?"

It was near midnight. The heavens glittered nearer to the earth; the _Swan_, the _Lyre_, _Hercules_,[211] beamed from where they had gone down through another blue of heaven. Great heaven,--said every heart,--dost thou belong to the human spirit, dost thou one day receive it, or art thou only like the ceiling-picture of a minster, which hides the limiting walls, and opens out with colors the prospect of a heaven which does not exist?--Ah, every Present makes our soul so small, and only a Future makes it so great.

Victor was beside himself, and said again: "Repose! neither joy nor sorrow can give thee, but only hope. Why is not all at rest within us, as around us?"

At that moment the knell of a shot, repeated by all the echoing woods, rang through the silent night,--and the Isle of Union swam up in the night-blue, and its white temple hung over it,--and beside the mourning-thicket, which grew up over the mouldering remains of a youthful heart, nine slender flames, which ran up on the nine c.r.a.pe-veils, shot up toward heaven, as if they were _feux de joie_ to a festival of _peace_.

Pale, hurrying, sighing, and silent, we touched the first sh.o.r.e of the island. The water was sucked up dry by the ground. The black Eastern gate had flung itself wide open, and leaned and hid its white painted sun against the trees. Many funeral torches, on white l.u.s.tres, attached themselves to the Eastern gate, went in through the long green avenue, flickered over ruins, sphinxes, and marble torsos, and ended darkly in the mourning-thicket.

Fluttering music of aeolian harps was permeated at the entrance by long tones. Under the Eastern gateway the blind one rested quietly and played joyously on his flute,--just as a dove flies into the thunder.

He fell joyfully on the neck of his Victor, and said: "It is good that thou comest; a tall, still man has lain a quarter of an hour on my heart, and wept into my hand, and given me a leaf for thee."

Victor s.n.a.t.c.hed the leaf; it read: "You have all sworn to fulfil my requests until such time as you hear my voice again; but uncover not the black marble."--His Lordship had given it to the blind son.

Victor cried: "O father! O father! I could not then make thee any requital!" and sank upon the breast of the son. He was about to tear himself away again, but the blind youth hung around him, and smiled with glad unconsciousness into the night.--We hastened into the mourning-thicket,--and, by the dim light of the two funeral torches that were burning down therein, we saw that a second grave had been scooped out there, the fresh earth of which lay near by,--that a black marble covered the hollow, and that the black dress of his Lordship peeped out a little way from the opening, and that in there he had killed himself.--And on his black marble stood, as upon the marble of his beloved, an ashy-pale heart, and below the heart stood in white letters the words:

"IT IS AT REST."

THE END.